Biopics Aren’t About People. They’re About Making Money

It’s a familiar set-up by now: A preternaturally handsome British spy flirts aggressively with a beautiful woman before going on to secure the future of the free world through a mix of gimmickry, bravery, and stiff-upper-lip stoicism. Along the way, he butts heads with a superior officer who objects to his unorthodox ways—but still manages to throw convention to the wind and save the day.

The latest James Bond movie sounds great, right? Sure … except this is about the onetime stockbroker who invented Bond.

Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond, a four-part mini-series that premiered last night on BBC America, tells the story of Ian Fleming, who created the suave British super-spy. It’s slick and agreeable, sure, but all that retro-cool gloss hides a worrisome trend. Biopics used to be a mix of entertainment, education, and guilt-free voyeurism—a peek behind the curtain at people who touched our lives in some way. Now, they’re a contradictory mix of hagiography and revisionism, lionizing their subjects while somehow managing to diminish them in comparison to the products of their imaginations.

Image credit: BBC America

In addition to Fleming, we have last month’s Saving Mr. Banks, about the creation of Disney’s Mary Poppins movie, and November’s An Adventure in Space and Time, which focused on the early years of the long-running BBC series Doctor Who. Taken together, the three represent a new form of onscreen biography—one that’s less an exploration of the subject’s life than an advertisement for the subject’s work.

In Fleming’s case, that means recasting Fleming’s pre-Bond work as a naval intelligence officer during WWII to hew to familiar Bond tropes—something that extends all the way to the leaden, quasi-misogynistic “banter” he engages in while wooing his wife-to-be. Sure, the result is entertaining, but ultimately the series’ attempt to straddle biography and action movie fails at both and leaves viewers unsatisfied. Bond movies may not purport to offer anything close to reality, but at least the explosions are bigger and the stakes more narratively coherent than what’s on offer here.

With both Saving Mr. Banks and An Adventure in Space and Time, there’s a much more pronounced emphasis on the creators’ creations, even to the detriment of the movies themselves. Saving Mr. Banks explains that Mary Poppins as the world knows her today is the result not of P.L. Travers’ work—despite the multiple Poppins books she published between 1934 and 1989—but of the character being “fixed” by the Walt Disney Company, and Disney himself, who “knows better” for the character than the woman who created her. In another revisionist twist, the movie ends with Travers being charmed by the Disneyfied version of the character, instead of her true response. (Surprise: She was appalled.)

An Adventure in Space and Time goes a step further and eliminates the author entirely. In the show, Who’s creative core is represented not by its writers—who barely merit a mention outside of a nod to Terry Nation, the man who created the Daleks—but by BBC Head of Drama Sydney Newman, producer Verity Lambert, and actor William Hartnell. Even so, throughout the story, all of them either leave the series for better opportunities, or—in Hartnell’s case—find themselves replaced when they can’t give Doctor Who their all. A cameo from then-Doctor Matt Smith underscores the larger point being made: Doctor Who will thrive, no matter what. Or, in other words, screw the writers.

These three projects make the same implicit claim: The people in question aren’t significant in any way beyond being able, through skill or serendipity, to contribute to some greater idea. Fleming goes so far as to suggest that Fleming’s life was so close to a Bond movie that his creating the character was essentially autobiography, or at least a foregone conclusion. (One scene even removes Fleming from naming his iconic creation; instead, the name is suggested to him at a party.) Whatever magic or mystery surrounded Travers or Newman only existed insofar as it could be funneled into their work. A cult of character has been established, and it utterly subsumes the work of the creator.

Of course, it makes a lot of sense for the BBC and Disney—who made An Adventure… and Saving Mr. Banks, respectively—to promote their larger properties. The BBC, in particular, created An Adventure… as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of Doctor Who, putting it on a level with such other shows as Doctor Who At The Proms, The Ultimate Guide to Doctor Who and The Science of Doctor Who—each one reinforcing the importance and versatility of Doctor Who as a brand.

Similarly, Disney is famously protective of its image and intellectual property—the idea of it producing a movie about the creation of one of its most famous live action productions that doesn’t place an emphasis on the perfection of the finished product is almost unthinkable.

The revisionism of these projects isn’t the result of a coordinated effort to “fix” the official record; all three were developed independently of each other by different writers, producers and studios (Fleming airs on BBC America in the U.S., but comes from BBC competitor Sky in the U.K.). The focus on properties rather than people—even in shows which claim to focus on the people behind the stories—seems to be the new standard. Now the show’s the thing, to paraphrase Shakespeare, with fictional worlds granted more credence than the people who dreamed them up. And that’s a shame.